Posted by anjel 3 hours ago
No US ship was to my knowledge even hit by a drone/missle.
Iran has been prepping forever for this with Russian/Chinese equipment.
This sounds identical to previous arguments I saw of how hard it would be for US to beat Iran in open conflict. China is different but comparing theoretical ability with reality is different also.
The only reality we have as of now is that f35 completely dominated the enemy on every single front. It's insane to see discussions like these when we just witnessed one of histories greatest showcases of technological dominance.
There is no technology or method in this conflict that would have changed the current state. If a nation wants to toss cheap drones at you there's basically nothing that can be done. Another example is US blockade, without something that can take an F35 down there is actively nothing Iran or China could do to prevent a complete crippling of their country.
The problem is that the F-35 was intended to be the low cost, mass produce-able workhorse for long protracted wars against technologically inferior adversaries where extremely high performance would be unnecessary. Yes it incorporates advanced stealth and electronics that make it a very capable aircraft, especially when it's going up against F-4s, but these weren't driving the cost. The US had already developed these technologies, and once you have them putting them on another aircraft isn't too expensive. And in particular the main focus was on lifetime cost - keeping flight hours reasonable and maintenance down compared to a higher performance aircraft like the F-22. This plane was designed around exactly this sort of conflict.
The problem was horrific project mismanagement. Building factories before the design was complete, delays due to development operations being done in parallel, making essentially 3 different aircraft with radically different requirements use a common design - the initial program cost skyrocketed and the only way out was to keep upping the order quantity to keep unit costs low. Cost per flight hour was supposed to be $25k, it's now $50k. Engine maintenance time was supposed to be 2 hours, it wound up being 50. And the issues didn't stop after initial development - with each successive iteration there have been new issues resulting in further delays, with airframe delivery on average still being 8 months behind schedule. None of that had anything to do with the F-35's core capabilities. For comparison, the F-35 has lower production costs than the non-stealth F-15EX which is based on a 50 year old airframe, but it has a 30% higher flight hour cost, and the program cost is 100X for 20X airframes.
This sort of botched procurement has caused terrible issues for multiple military projects, such as the Navy's failed Constellation-class frigate program, or the Army's immediate cancellation of the M10 Booker. These aren't masterpieces built for the wrong war, these are failures at producing what was intended. One has to wonder how you can mess up Epiphone guitar production so bad you accidentally wind up with a Stradivarius. It does not bode well for the orchestra.
The Connie is a good ship and the two under contract will be fine vessels when they're commissioned. Frigates are no longer "cheap" ships, and the sticker shock was higher than expected despite the obvious changes that were going to be made to the FREMM design. But it's cancellation has more to do with dysfunction at the top of the Navy (and DoD) then the program of record.
Also, you're overestimating the flight hour costs of the F-35. Even the B model doesn't hit $50k. The other variants are closer to $35k/hour (adjusted for inflation) than $50K.
I think in a serious drone war we would just have fleets of Cesnas flying around with a person hanging out the door with a shotgun lol.
Note that the original article doesn't say anywhere that F-35-like capability is not needed.
Of course it was all tied up with needing allies to buy to increase order size, and the UK Bukit the STOVL bits, so naturally they had to buy all STOVL jets to increase British industry buy.
It's a rat's nest of everyone trying to please all their stakeholders. It is, eventually, a great jet, but it could have been a better, cheaper jet, delivered sooner, and already past Block 5.
Oh yeah, did anyone mention how long it takes to integrate a new system onto the F-35? Fracking years. All of which has to be done by LM, forever. Because the F-35 is not a jet, it's a Master Contract.
The saying "Quantity has a quality all of its own" is not obsolete in 2026.
The range of the F-35 is too low for the Navy, because it sits in the F-16 concept. But there is no fighter/interceptor split in the AF either, and the range is too low for AF as well.
So now we have the F-47, a very belated ack that the F-35 has short legs. But it also won't fix the problem because it is too focused on the F-22 role, absolute air dominance against e.g. J-20.
No one should call it success. It is what it is.
This problem is beyond parties and trying to play partisan politics about it only prolongs the hurt.
I'm not an expert but from my friends in the industry (including multiple at Lockheed and Boeing), it's definitely not a story about how good and efficient the private sector is. Boeing especially sounds like it's been a real mess with a lot of project management issues.
I’m currently watching an 8-figure park remodeling project happening near home. Instead of hiring one or two competent construction managers for a few hundred thousand dollars, the city seems to be spending several million dollars for outside management to oversee this one project. (Never mind how much they’re overpaying for the actual construction.)
This would help at all levels.
It's very difficult as a government employee to properly supervise contractors when you have little idea what those contractors are actually doing.
But it's hard to gain that experience when you don't actually ever do those things yourself either.
Empower competent people and the government can still succeed, even today. The issue is that everything seem stacked against the idea of either retaining competence or empowering those who are competent to do their work.
Aside from the very real attempts by people to defang the government by offloading all of its functions to the private sector, government is also undermined by an entirely different coterie of idealist, who believe that all the government needs is more process and coordination.
It's very hard indeed to retain competent personnel when they're needlessly mired in non-value-added process steps that are there simply to provide CYA box-checking.
As for this one:
>I’m currently watching an 8-figure park remodeling project happening near home. Instead of hiring one or two competent construction managers for a few hundred thousand dollars, the city seems to be spending several million dollars for outside management to oversee this one project.
Every time the government touches any money, there is an opportunity for corruption. I'm betting that there are kickbacks, nepotism, or some other bullshit involved in the case you mention here. There are countless fraud schemes. California is trying to pass a law against people like Nick Shirley investigating and reporting on widespread fraud, because they know where their bread is buttered.
The author's main argument against the F-35 is that it can be easily destroyed on runways now, as drones and missile developments have outpaced missile defense, leaving the US and US allies vulnerable to a preemptive strike by China.
That might be true, but it's also strategically valuable to diminish the military capabilities of allies of China (e.g. the Iranian theocracy), which may make up for the tactical weaknesses of the F-35 against China in a direct confrontation. It's also possible that drone/missile defense will catch up (e.g. lasers), but that's hard to say at this point.
And naturally F-35s on that theatre would have been a game changer making mass strikes on Moscow possible. For all the dysfunctions of American military industrial complex it remains a fighter without peers (unless you count F-22) or serious AD threat.
The psychology of Ukraine's drone campaign as a response to Russia's original drone launches is very interesting. It's a classic boiling frog move.
Drones are seen as an improvised amateur threat. Unlike a bombing campaign, which is seen as "proper war", drones are an annoyance. They're fragile, cheap, unglamorous, unsophisticated, easy to shoot down, and wasteful, because you need tens or hundreds to make sure a few get through.
That gives drone campaigns a huge advantage. You can do a lot of damage and your enemy doesn't quite get what's happening.
Psychologically, there's a Rubicon-level difference between someone dropping bombs on Leningrad from a plane and a drone swarm attacking the same targets.
In practice the threat level is similar. Drones have absolutely become an existential threat to Russia.
But psychologically, they're not seen as such.
His risk management strategy is to have redundant everything, so there's no single point of failure. Lots of small drones. Distributed operators. Many small factories. Varied command and control systems. He makes the point that they use lots of different kinds of drones - some fast with wings, some slow with rotors, some that run on treads on the ground. There's no "best drone". Using multiple types in a coordinated way makes it hard for the enemy to counter attacks. No one defense will stop all the drones.
Ukraine built 4,000,000 drones in 2025. This year, more. The Ukrainian military needs a new generation of drones about every three months, as the opposition changes tactics. They view most US drones as obsolete, because the product development and life cycle is far too long. (See "OODA loop" for the concept.)
This is a big problem for the US military's very slow development process. Development of the F-35 started over 30 years ago.
[1] https://www.economist.com/europe/2026/03/22/ukraines-top-dro...
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/moscow-comes-under-one-of...
https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/russia...
Even if Russia sees a particular tactic or weapons system as an existential threat it's questionable whether they have the capability to escalate further. I mean they can threaten nuclear strikes on Ukrainian population centers but would anyone believe that the threats are credible?
They claimed that with basically every little sprinkle of new aid for like two years, until everyone realized it was a bluff.
Putin is many things, but actively suicidal looks like a no.
Everything else is just an order for preemptive suicide.
Russia would never nuke Ukraine to begin with. They know that by doing so, most of the world would unite against them, and many, including Putin, would be on the chopping block.
Mostly because that's useless. Ukrainian weapon production and economy is located in Europe. Ukraine is basicaly western PMC now.
If nuclear war starts, nukes would be falling on European cities and facilities, not Ukrainian.
I think that's the above comment's point. Attack moscow -> existential threat -> they're already on the chopping block -> nukes.
Russia is not fighting Ukraine, it is fighting NATO in Ukraine. And, IIANM, it has the capability of hitting non-Ukranie NATO targets in various places around the world - with cruise missiles and such. The assumption that "oh, Russia will never do this" is actually quite reckless and dangerous; and I don't just mean dangerous to whoever would get attacked, but dangerous for people all over the world, as we may find ourselves in a nuclear exchange with multiple blasts in multiple locations with radioactive matter spread far and wide.
Regarding the drones - definitely agree with you that drones have completely reshaped the experience on the front lines of this war. I understand that in a recent exercise with NATO forces, a Ukranian unit of drone operators essentially "took out" a couple of battalions:
If that is the case they are doing a poor job at doing so, without even fighting the full might of NATO.
They have been getting replacement MiG-29s and Su-25s from allies and are starting to use f-16s from NATO nations.
"A coalition of NATO countries, primarily the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, and Belgium, are providing F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine. The United States authorized the transfer and is providing training and spare parts, with deliveries having begun in 2024 to strengthen Ukraine's air force against Russia."
So yes, they still have an airforce. They're just getting re-supplied.
Also the Ukrainian airforce was ULTRA conservative about sorties to make sure they conserved as many fighters as possible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerial_warfare_in_the_Russo-Uk...
https://aerospaceglobalnews.com/news/how-many-aircraft-losse...
I am not sure what is meant by 'a significant number of', and I'm not sure if all commenters have a common definition of that phrase, so I'm unable to judge the veracity of the comments above.
indicates what the author said is true.
The majority of these losses are on the ground.
Oh yeah, I'd like to see you try that.
Maduro was a clown. Iran is two orders of magnitude above Venezuela and the US (plus friends) are already struggling.
Russia is at least one order of magnitude above Iran.
I have no doubt that the US would win at the end, but at a massive cost of life and money. You cannot afford that, you cannot even afford a 1/10th of that.
I live in America, I'm obviously pro-America, but losing touch with reality will only make things worse.
The world is not like your RTS games.
> And naturally F-35s on that theatre would have been a game changer making mass strikes on Moscow possible.
And then what? Kyiv has been under relentless strikes from drones and missiles for 5 years. And Moscow was hit by Ukrainian drones several times.
You'll need to suppress all the anti-air defenses first, and it will likely be too costly.
You write that, and literally quote my point about F-35 making deep strikes against dense air defense possible in the very next sentence.
Both Russia and Ukraine learned to avoid concentrating forces, so what are you going to strike? Use an F-35 to attack a single Jeep with a mounted machine gun? F-35 has limited range and carries very limited armament, so you can't just carpet-bomb everything. At some point, you'll need to use much less survivable heavy bombers.
> bridges, dams, power plants
A war crime, btw. Bridges and dams are also notoriously hard to destroy.
> The heavy B-2 bombers are themselves quite survivable
They are, but less so compared to lighter aircraft.
The Chinese are going to spam literally MILLIONS of drones all over the Pacific...
Relatedly, aircraft carriers are great for beating up on small powers, but they are vulnerable and would not be effective at reaching across the ocean and bombing China.
Plus, both nations have nukes, so the idea of either China or the US "winning" a war against the other side is easily cancelled out.
What you are left with, is a lot of posturing about superpower wars which is a waste of time. All sort of people thumping their chest, wargaming things out, as if any of this nonsense isn't immediately squashed with the nuclear trump card.
There will be no superpower wars.
There will, however, continue to be wars against smaller states, and the F35, aircraft carriers, etc, are really effective at those kinds of things. That is, effective at waging the wars that will actually happen. Nukes and the pacific ocean stop any war of consequence against China.
The primary problem with killing carriers is, has been, and will be, finding the things.[1]
Drone strikes on oil refineries work because, with few exceptions, the refineries rarely move. You can literally program a drone to go x miles in a specific direction and then drop a bomb.
It's also considerably harder to hide things like drones in big empty spaces.
If loitering drones became a serious threat (as opposed to the, you know, literally super sonic missiles the navy has spent the last 40 years planning for) itms pretty easy to imagine anti-drone planes/ships/drones sweeping a large radius around your carriers.
[1] Satellites can definitely do things, but they're not magical and people can track where they're looking and just... sail in a different direction. Also if someone was actually using satellites to target american carriers with munitions the americans would probably just destroy the satellites.
The interesting thing about drones is the ability to attack from many directions at the same time, overwhelming the short-range defenses. IIRC no fewer than 5 naval drones attacked the Moskva missile carrier at once, and successfully sank it eventually. Naval drones are compact, barely visible, and, unlike torpedoes, highly maneuverable.
Aerial drones are also highly maneuverable. Large navy ships are pretty tough on the outside, able to withstand a blast of a moderate-size shell or bomb. But they have smaller, harder-to-reach vulnerable areas. This is the kind of target drones are apt to attack precisely.
Most anti-air weapons are pretty expensive to fire, because they were intended against high-value targets like planes or cruise missiles. They are insufficient and wasteful to fire against hundreds of small, inexpensive targets.
It's like having a shotgun and a sledgehammer, but fighting against a swarm of hornets. Despite a large advantage in damage-dealing capacity, you quickly become incapacitated.
At minimum they travel with 6 or 7 ships and leave a wake a mile long and they only go tens of miles an hour, it isnt a speed boat.
Here is an Indian carrier (formerly Russian) on google maps and the US ones are large https://www.google.com/maps/place/14%C2%B044'30.3%22N+74%C2%...
I think people forget how many satellites are pointed at all parts of the planet. They are used for crop reporting and weather and all sorts of shit. It isnt the 1960s where only the super powers have them and they drop rolls of film.
I know nothing about this really, so forgive my ignorance.
Assuming a carrier is found and tracked by a satellite in the ocean, how could it possibly escape the satellite's detection before being targeted by a drone or some other type of munition? If the ship starts sailing in a different direction, the people (or AI) tracking via satellite would notice and adjust, right?
I don't know how many military satelites China has, but I would have assumed it would be sufficient to cover the pacific sufficiently to find an aircraft carrier. (the obvious caveat here being clouds, which are fairly common over the ocean)
https://www.csis.org/analysis/no-place-hide-look-chinas-geos...
What?
> unless they're on the equator
What?
> because otherwise they have to be moving
What?
https://www.esa.int/Enabling_Support/Space_Transportation/Ty...
Despite the nuclear reactor, aircraft carriers won't stay in the fight long if their supply lines are disrupted. And also it's not likely that a carrier group could fend off a wave of 10,000-20,000 drones launched from a container ship that happens to be sailing near it.
At the end of the day, we rely more on nuclear weapons and MAD to deter these kinds of major hostilities between powerful countries. Talking about how conventional weapons match up is a bit of a red herring. The only thing that would change that would be very reliable nuclear missile/warhead interception systems - and I don't think any country even has a roadmap to such a thing.
To sink an aircraft carrier you really need like 10 direct hits with hypersonic missiles. Or a couple of hits with a torpedo. If you are lucky, maybe even a single torpedo hit. People underestimate how hard it is to sink a ship. You really have to attack it below the water line, from the bottom. A single torpedo is more effective than 100,000 drones when it comes to sinking big ships.
What drones could do, is damage the runway and radars and other equipment that would constitute a "mission kill" -- e.g. the carrier has to withdraw for a period to fix the damage to equipment on deck.
But now think a little bit -- the drones have limited range. They have to be launched from somewhere. So just launch missiles from that location. You get the same thing -- a mission kill. You don't need a million drones. And the missile will have much larger range than the drones, and will cause more damage.
So the bottom line of all of this is no US aircraft carrier would venture near Chinese shores in the event of a war with china. That is probably because those shores would be lightning up with mushroom clouds anyway, as would ours. So what do you need the drones for?
Of course I understand wanting to be prepared even for grim scenarios such as these. Military strategists should of course continually be refining such plans. But casual discussions like this, without even so much as a disclaimer about it being a hypothetical and extremely undesirable outcome, may pave the way towards it through normalization.
Which does take it into a kind of Schroedinger's realm. The US takes it seriously, so it develops technology for it, and China doesn't invade. But would China have invaded if the US hadn't prepared for that war? Quite possibly, but you can never know.
Now I understand it has a large impact because of oil prices and the closing of the strait of hormuz, but don't confuse the economic impact of the closing of shipping lanes with something that "exhausts" the US military.
Remember this is the military that spent two decades in Afghanistan and Iraq, using considerably more resources. Those were actual wars, followed by occupations that lasted two decades. And that didn't exhaust the US.
In terms of the Naval cost, it is occupying 15% of ships, with zero ships sunk or damaged. I believe there were 13 soldiers killed during strikes on bases in the area. Those bases have been manned for decades and have not exhausted the US Army. Let's maintain some perspective.
Exhausting key functionality like that will absolutely lead to major losses of things like manpower and ships against a near-peer adversary.
I do not think most Americans would care to defend Taiwan, even against the China boogeyman. The practical realities of losing Chinese goods would be a devastating reality few are prepared to face.
I personally would not be willing to do anything to defend Taiwan from China. But then again, I don't support any of the wars we fought in the middle east, either.
Every day this conflict continues is going to have devastating political outcomes. I largely subscribe to the belief that Kamala losing was a reflection that people were mad at inflation.
Do you know what does belong to the west? ASML. What makes TSMC actually work.
At that time, I believed it "We are running out of missiles, we are running out of shells", etc.
But it turns out the US adapted. They increased production, they substituted for next best options, they got other countries to produce for us, and still we have not run out. Not after years of Ukraine.
So I am no longer on the "US is running out of munitions" bandwagon. Plus, this military spending increases productive capacity.
Even with ramp ups, you are looking at 3 to 4 years before extra production actually shows up. And for the really constrained systems like GBU-57, cruise missiles tied to Williams engines, or anything needing Chinese gallium, even that timeline is probably optimistic if China keeps export controls in place.
And this constant comparison to Iraq or Afghanistan just does not hold up. Those were wars where the US could sit in safe zones and strike from distance. A Taiwan scenario is completely different. It is right on China’s doorstep, against a peer the US has never actually faced at this scale. Even the USSR was not comparable in terms of economic integration or industrial strength.
edit:
If the ceasefire collapses this Wednesday as Trump has signaled, these numbers will start moving again, and the replacement time estimates will only get worse because the industrial base hasn't yet begun delivering against any of the surge contracts
The last few wars started by the US were based on scenarios that looked good on paper and in reality they did not went so well.
Look at the Iran war: "we're gonna kill their supreme leader and the regime will fall". Almost two months later nothing changed in any significant way despite bombing it relentlessly.
Coming back to your concern, I'm pretty sure some people at the Pentagon believe the US can fight China using an expeditionary force and somehow win.
the followon effects like the closing of the straight were obvious which is why few Iran hatehs thought it was a good idea
The only way to oust the regime is with ground troops, ripping out the Revolutionary Guard and its tentacles. For all its corruption, Iran is far from a failed state, and there aren't factions waiting in the wings, ready and willing to take over the government with force. (There are political factions, to be sure, but they're already integrated into the government, though without leverage over the Revolutionary Guard.) The only armed group remotely capable of even trying would be the Kurds, but the US and in particular Trump screwed them over in the past, multiple times. Even if they thought they could go it alone (which they couldn't), there was zero chance they were going to enter the fray without the US committing itself fully with their own invasion force (i.e. success was guaranteed), because failure would mean ethnic Kurds would be extirpated from Iran, and might induce Iraq and Syria to revisit the question of Kurdish loyalty to their own states. And, indeed, Kurdish groups took a wait and see approach, assembling some forces but waiting to see how the US played their cards.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/07/us/politics/trump-iran-wa... https://archive.ph/gaHnu
It's a little ironic that its due in part[1] to Trump's reticence to commit ground forces that we've come to this pass. I hesitate to criticize that disposition, but at the same time it's malfeasance to start a war without being willing and able to fully commit to the objective.
[1] Assuming the war had to happen, which of course it didn't.
It’ll be more concerning if wasn’t discussed in such a way. War is rarely reasonable. China doesn’t find it unreasonable to go to war over Taiwan. And for what? National pride and unity? It’s completely unreasonable, but everything they’re developing militarily is exactly for that. We must approach the subject clearly and explore every possibility as a real one. These discussions are about ending wars as quickly and decisively as possible while causing the minimal amount death.
The hype is it's own product.
Not that we could afford wars with non-superpowers either.
Most modern military planning considers it a foregone conclusion. Whether that's accurate or not is arguable, but approaching discussions of military spending from a perspective grounded in current planning is certainly reasonable.
> Meanwhile, modern conflict, from Ukraine’s drone war to naval engagements in the Red Sea to Iran’s own mass missile and drone salvos, increasingly favors systems that can be produced at scale and replaced when lost.
In the conclusion:
> The lesson of the Iran campaign is that the F-35 performed superbly in exactly the kind of fight it was built for. The lesson for force designers is that the next war may not be that fight.
What a weird article. It starts out by saying f-35 is not fit for modern war. Concludes by saying it works perfectly in modern war.
The middle part talks about combining f-35 with drones to get the best of both worlds, but isn't that what people already are doing? Iran war allegedly had lots of drones on both sides.
And of course blowing up iran is going to be totally different from some hypothetical war with china. Will the f-35 work well in a conflict with china? I have no idea but the article didn't really make any convincing arguments about it.
It did.
It pointed out that the bases from which the F-35s would have to operate in a war with China would be very vulnerable:
"The concentration of high-value equipment and personnel at each operating location makes the F-35’s basing problem qualitatively different from that of simpler aircraft. The loss is not just one jet but the capacity to generate sorties from that site."
It pointed out that you can't produce F-35s at scale, which fucks you in the long run:
"At over eighty million dollars per airframe, with Lockheed Martin delivering fewer than two hundred aircraft per year across all variants and all customers worldwide, there is no surge capacity waiting to be activated and no precedent for accelerating a program of this complexity on wartime timelines. When one side can produce weapons by the hundreds and thousands — missiles, loitering munitions, and one-way attack drones — while the other relies on small numbers of exquisite platforms, the advantage shifts toward the side with scale."
The key message of the article is simply this (which should not be "weird" to anyone):
"The corrective is not to abandon the F-35 but to redefine its role. A smaller fleet should be reserved for the missions that truly require its unique capabilities — penetrating advanced air defenses, gathering intelligence in contested environments, and orchestrating distributed networks of unmanned systems. The marginal procurement dollar should shift toward platforms that are cheaper to build, easier to replace, less dependent on vulnerable forward infrastructure, and expendable in ways that manned fighters are not."
The article gets this wrong as well, the f35 can be built at scale, no other fighter aircraft is produced in such high numbers, its also significantly cheaper on a per airframe basis vs Gen 4 aircraft and its more advanced. This article is nonsense and the author doesn't know what they are talking about.
Really? Can you indicate how many can be produced yearly?
But it's a bit irrelevant because we couldn't produce enough pilots either -- the training pyramid means you can only graduate so many new pilots each year, capped by the number of instructors at each level.
There is a similar problem with drone pilots -- it took Ukraine and Russia years to scale up and get to the current level of skill. However, training drone controllers is cheaper because the aircraft cost nothing.
Ukraine produces thousands of drones a day, including interceptor drones.
A valid question is how the investment in drone warfare is best balanced with that in traditional warfare, but that is besides the point of the difference in scaling production.
It is to investigate new technologies (i.e. how do we control a thousand drones) and preserve domain knowledge in a large number of engineers spanning multiple generations. If all these engineers go work at $BIG_TECH optimizing ad revenue for watching short videos, we'll have to rediscover basics the next time.
When we have to fight the next serious war, we are not going to primarily use F-35 jets built twenty years ago, it's going to be something built on a similar platform in larger numbers to specifically address challenges of that era. If it can not be made cheap enough, whatever contractors involved are going to be nationalized. All major wars between comparable powers were fought with technology hot off the assembly lines, not billion dollar prototype models developed twenty years ago to bomb caves in deserts.
If you look at it from this angle, all the idiosyncrasies make sense. There's of course the inefficiency of defense contractors skimming off profits at multiple layers, but if you find a solution to that while preserving productivity, you'd win the economics nobel tomorrow.
That is, to some extent, what the F-35 is; the mass-produced plane that incorporates what we learned from the F-117 and F-22 and whatnot. We've already made 10x as many as the F-22's production run.
There are barely more than a thousand F-35s, the number of US aircrafts used in WW2 was about 300,000.
If China produces 100 times or 1000 times their current numbers (and they can), marginal differences in capability are not going to matter.
If china somehow learnes magic and produced 10,000 f16 equivalents and got into a major non-nuclear shooting war with the united states... they'd lose 10,000 planes. At some point there is such a qualitative difference that numbers don't really matter.
That has never really happened in history, so good luck I guess.
In WW2 the US would send a 1,000 bombers to hit a target and still miss. That's why they needed so many. Now a single attack jet can hit multiple targets with very high probability.
Quantity is back in the game again thanks to drones, right now we would lose without escalating to a nuclear war.
They get sanctioned and/or hit by B-2s long before the factories to do so are even completed, let alone producing a hundred thousand fighter jets.
Yes, if you can bomb your opponent without retribution you can indeed get away with what we have now.
This is what the F-35 and the modern US airforce is built for. We're likely not going to be fighting desert nomads forever.
I thought the F-22 investigated the technologies and the F-35 is the mass-produced version.
When we have to fight the next serious war ... it's going to be something built on a similar platform in larger numbers to specifically address challenges of that era.
Not if every jet takes 20 years to develop.
If it can not be made cheap enough, whatever contractors involved are going to be nationalized.
Which would accomplish nothing since the rot is so deep.
The 6th gen platforms appear to be coming in at significantly reduced cost relatively to what they are replacing, which was a major objective.
Sure, I'd think of it as a mass^2 produced version then ;)
> Not if every jet takes 20 years to develop.
Think of F-35 variants, not entirely new platforms. If I have to guess, one reduced to a barebones autonomous version built for the purpose to commanding drone swarms and dealing with incoming drone swarms.
The irony, of course, is that the US military knew that back in WWII in how the Sherman tank was able to defeat the "better" German tanks for all the same reasons listed above.
Don't really see or hear about the USA building or using propeller driven planes in military outside of special ops.
It's always been about the biggest, fastest, longest range punch. That is extremely useful for deep strike (which has always been NATO doctrine), but when the range is short you need quantity and mobility far more than you need quantity.
Being able to cut off your enemy is an extremely effective weapon if your enemy needs massive supply. Drop the major bridges between Moscow and Ukraine and the war would soon be over.
But when you can't do that for whatever reason you need quantity and mobility far more than you need quality.
As someone a while back put it, Russia lost several Bundeswehrs worth of equipment and keeps on grinding. Neither side is able to mass large forces, in a large part due to drones. And Iran can punish the US despite being comically outgunned.
Modern equivalents of Sherman and T-34 tanks over burdensome Tigers and a population willing to support heavy losses.
The problem is that the early WWII arms race was so fast that I don't know how anybody can say with confidence that Germany lost to worse tanks than theirs. By the time the allies got any volume into battle, they also got better designs than their earlier ones.
* Quantity has a quality all of its own.
* Innovation and agility allows you to adapt and survive.
* Low capability platforms often can't be used to deliver useful effect & commanders will try every option not to use them in a fight. When they get committed it can be disastrous.
The first two clearly have merits, but every military professional I have ever worked with has cited them at me, so I don't think that they are underweighted in discussion. I believe that the last one is not treated with enough weight in the debate. The best example I have of it is the Russian Black Sea Fleet. Platforms with glaring problems, fielded and maintained at huge cost, completely unable to achieve their strategic purpose. Even when sulking in port these ships have proven to be deadly for their crews and maintainers. Another example is the TB3 drone. It had a staring role for about 10 days in the Ukraine, but those were 10 days where the Russians ran out of petrol to run their air defence systems on. It hasn't been in evidence since because it just can't be used in the current environment.
One that worries me is the upcoming T31 (uk arrowhead variant) frigate. The argument for it is that it is a relatively affordable platform that the RN will have enough of to actually be able to get out and about. However, it doesn't have a sonar, so... what actual use is it as a frigate (I know the story about the helicopter and some other bits and bobs... but... really?)
Sure, when the other side has run out of the good kit dragging crap out of storage might work, but until then you are going to be sending good men to their death in second rate equipment. Is that going to build war winning morale?
Second rate equipment is for playing lets pretend, or for fighting wars of national survival. We should avoid both.
The big stuff is for trying to keep the small stuff away from the battlefield. When you can't do that for whatever reason you need a bunch of small stuff of your own.
But a frigate without sonar isn't inherently horrible--lots of places don't have subs.
Another data point is that it's estimated that all student debt in the US combined is $1.7 - 1.8 trillion.
No wonder America keeps falling behind.
This isn't even remotely true, who is paying you to post this drivel?
I'm not so sure the F-35 is built for the wrong war as much as the war would probably call for the F-35 if it didn't already exist.
Again, this was 10-15 years ago. Now with the Ukraine war everyone acts like it is obvious...and I agree, it has been for awhile. We just never had a theater to test this stuff in. I suspect US defense contractors were on-board for Ukraine and Iran to advance development efforts significantly.
They have only come around a little at present. US Army is still buying Apache.
The US primes were caught napping in Ukraine, all the new tech is indigenous. They haven't deployed anything new successfully. The traditional exquisite weapons could win the war early, but of course Biden held them back because he's an idiot, and Trump spent them against Iran. Now they are gone. In the mean time, Trump cancelled the infrastructure to design and build armaments during DOGE cuts, now he wants to scale back up, but the money will be wasted because industrial capacity is not there.
And the military is corrupt. They misplace hundreds of millions of dollars (cash) when they go overseas. The IRS is responsible for finding massive fraud schemes that the military never noticed. Why didn't they notice? Because there's no consequence. The military isn't a business; they can practically write blank checks with taxpayer dollars, and if they lose the money, what're we gonna do, fire them? Same for contractors. They can overcharge us or build faulty weapon systems/vehicles/etc, and it's not like we have 10 alternatives around the corner.